About

Dobot: Robotic Arm for Everyone, Arduino & Open Source

$615,600

pledged of $36,000 goal

1,208

backers

Here's our social account, please stay stuned:

Our dream is to bring the industrial robot arm to daily life, let everyone can enjoy the joy of it and simplify the life from doing repetitive tasks. So we tried to creat a high repeat precision (up to 0.2mm), stepper motor, Arduino-based, easy to control, low-cost desktop robotic arm. It calls Dobot.

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How Dobot Arm make the magic happen?

Imagine when your new born baby says "flower" the first time in his/her life, and it gets sent to a Arduino robotic arm, automatically the word transforms to the character 龙 (dragon, see the gif below) in Chinese calligraphy on a piece of paper or a 3D printed plastic flower, or be typed on a mobile phone that sends to your parents.

Dobot robotic arm can also help you write some sweet words for your lovers, no matter what language.

As makers, we love tools. Dobot robot arm will play a big role being a good tool, you can grave a film figure by yourself with the help of Dobot arm, sounds cool, isn't it? DIY the Kung Fu Panda, Baymax, Mario or other figure you like now !

3D printing pen with Dobot

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Real time 3D printing!

With the high repeatability of Dobot, we can mount a 3D printer head on our robotic arm and turn our Dobot arm into a 3D printer! Check the Update #12 for more.

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Moreover

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Who are talking about Dobot?

Even the Co-founder of Arduino wants to buy one! The Dobot team was extremely flattered when running into the Massimo Banzi at the 2015 Shenzhen Maker Faire and hearing he say he liked it and wanted to buy one!

"I'm lucky to get the chance to see lots of hardware projects, but Dobot's blend of high production value, precision and openness has me really excited!" —— Jeremy Gordon, Former Vice President @Twitter

Imagine more what we can do with Dobot

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Dobot is versatile and designed for everyone. It can draw, write, text, move, grab things following your orders. It liberates your arms from doing repetitive tasks. For more advanced makers, Dobot has great potential to be an essential part of your own project.

PCB Soldering with Dobot robotic arm

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With high accuracy precision, Dobot arm even can help you to grab some little nail!

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Can Dobot use a mobile phone to turn off the lights? Can Dobot fetch an apple in a folder by brain (EEG) control? Of course! We are firm believers in furthering the possibilities of Dobot robotic arm! Now it’s your turn to make your magic of Dobot happen.

Accurate handling

Assemble Iron Man by a robot arm.

PTZ camera

Feed and tickle your pets

Play board games against the robot

Mobile Handling

You can do what you want with Dobot Robot Arm.

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Why Choose Dobot Arm?

Dobot Brings Industrial Precision and Power to Your Life

Dobot’s high precision is the highlight. We spent much of our energy to optimize its technology. With such a low cost, we have managed to maintain the industrial precision level. When performing repetitive actions, the error in precision is as small as 0.2mm, empowering you to do delicate work without losing the precision. See below for more detailed info on specs.

Dobot is super easy to control

Easy usability comes first during the design of Dobot. We have given a lot of thought on users without technical backgrounds, and how to help them better control robotic arms. In order to make as young as 5-years-old kids able to use Dobot in ease, we have done extensive research and designed 7 controlling methods, including PC, mobile APP, EEG, voice, vision, leap motion and gestures, whichever suits your purpose the best.

Stepper motor: Dobot works quietly

We have also considered on where the users will be using it, and tired our best to make the noise level as low as possible. By using customized stepper motor, we are able to minimize noise level, making Dobot much quieter than low-cost servo robotic arms and more household-friendly.

Here’s a comparison video with servo based robotic arms.

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Dobot is open source

Dobot will be open sourced after the Kickstarter campaign. As a group of devoted open source fans, we believe open source makes the world better by levering the power of collective minds. Yet to help you understand better of what we do, we are working around the clock on some of the code that need more notations and explanations. But we make our promise here that after the Kickstarter campaign, we will upload the code. Keep in touch, there are more surprises to come.

Dobot supports three OpenSource Firmware for special application and developer.

Even More Exciting For Makers!

Dobot supports three OpenSource Firmware for special applications and developers with different programming preferences.

1. Complete developed by Dobot team
Easy for developers familiar with Industrial robots.

Also we provide communication interface for OpenCV (http://opencv.org/) to add vision to Dobot.

Dobot is a maker team and we create what's best for makers. We use Arduino as the controller. Although when tackling some critical problems, we found this might not be the perfect solution, after continuous improvements, we believe this could equip superb functionality with Dobot.

Processing is the widely-applauded data visualization and programming platform for beginners. Simply drag and click, you can program Dobot at your will on its user-friendly interface.

Scratch is also a briiliant visual programming language that's more widely used by children, artists and makers. It helps them to control and program all types of electronic devices and interactive products. Dobot's control is based on the easy-for-understanding serial communication protocol whose working principles are all open-sourced. We will add more manpower in developing control extensions based on Scratch, and believe this will make operating Dobot applications easier for children, enabling them to bring their ideas to life.

Arduino Library

We have included diversified written motion functions for user to make their own Dobot code community. We’ve included forward and inverse solution, point to point, line, jump Path Planning, everything is open source, and you can make it better. These code examples have very similar principles to industrial robot developing and they are very useful for one who wants to understand how an industrial robot works.
In our code, we provide the limit and working range protection, various joint and coordinate commands, combine these functions and you are the magician.

Electronic Parts

Our initial thought was to design a shield for the Arduino (Mega2560) for connecting mega2560 and 3 stepper driver boards and also to contain a current amplifying module to drive the vacuum pump and the solenoid valve. Meanwhile, it can manage driving 2 servos with 3 steppers. Based on that, we modified the design to accommodate more users, thus another shield of Arduino was born to satisfy all of the above functions. This eliminates the constitute of stepper driver boards and reconsiders the measures for overcurrent protection and heat dissipation. Our core competency is to employ fewer wires with a better outlook ensured.

Tech. Spec.

Rewards

The Quality Assurance

Mechanical Parts

How Dobot is made and how we made its incredible precision level possible.

The mechanical structure entirely employed CNC cutting technology. For key parts the machinery accuracy has reached 0.02mm. Joint connections adopted high accuracy axes coupled with chrome alloy interference lit, ensuring structural stability and accuracy. On the motor side, Dobot designed the high accuracy speed reducer motor, providing consistent motor power for the robot arm. On the material side, Dobot was made of high strength aluminium alloy and processed by anodic oxidation treatment, to ensure the sleekness and strength of the surface.

Here's some details about the manufacturing, we chose the high performance CNC machine instead of laser cut to guarantee a 0.02mm precision, which provides the basis of our high quality.

For software, we have done a great deal of optimization. The software supports speed look-ahead small line blocks interpolation algorithm, able to fit any type of curve and ensure processing efficiency. Moreover, with the Three Axes Linkage Method fine interpolation, you can control the trajectory of the end effector of the Dobot accurately, empowering it with complex curvilinear motions.

Dobot is affordable!

We wanted to make sure Dobot is accessible to everyone. Through immense effort and countless negotiations with suppliers, we were able to get better deals without compromising the quality and reliability. That’s how we made the price so affordable so more users could use it. We are at our beginning stage and would like to invite you to help promote Dobot so more people passionate about making could know about us. We will offer discounts and refunds to show our appreciation for your support.

To do so, after you purchase Dobot, simply fill out the Dobot Promotion Code (which will be included in the package) and Paypal account information, and we will return 20~100 U.S. Dollars to your account. You can also choose gifts with equal value, and we will ship it to you along with the package.

How to get the Dobot promotion code?

If you repost or comment our post on Facebook Page/Group, we will randomly select the users to whom we will give the Dobot Promotion Code.

You can also get in touch with reviewers and community influencers, they will be distributing Dobot Promotion Codes to lucky fans and devoted users as well. Good luck!

Keep posted with the Update on the promotion information.

How things going?

Why Kickstarter

We have spent years developing our core technologies. We now need an active passionate community to provide us feedback. With your support we can hire additional help and scale our production capabilities. Thank you for taking the time to learn about our mission to enable seamless design and manufacturing.

Feel free to write to us what do you think about Dobot and what do you want us to add to make it better for you!

Who is Creating Dobot Arm?

Dobot is created by the Dobot team. We are committed to creating a desktop and family-mode industrial robot to control so that everyone can have a desktop assistant and family assistant, which is easy to assemble and control, empowered by high precision.

As a group of six industrial robot engineer, we love robot design and we are hoping to satisfy the needs of the people for the desktop manipulator with the lowest cost and simplest control method. We firmly believe that multiple cooperative robots or even a production assembly line will appear on your desktop in the future as we launch a series of new models.

Communication

If you still have other questions, you can post a comment or send an email to us: dobotinfo@gmail.com or contact us via our facebook page, we will answer you as soon as possible.

Partner

Risks and challenges

We have spent over a year actively developing Dobot. We are manufacturing a majority of the parts in-house to limit quality control and fulfillment issues. The remaining parts are off-the-shelf components and do not require custom engineering for our application.

Precision robotic arms are difficult to manufacture and calibrate. We have spent months refining our design and automating processes to limit this difficulty.

We are finalizing the PCB layout for Dobot. Firmware for Dobot can be updated remotely. At the conclusion of this campaign we anticipate user feedback to develop a library of application specific interfaces for existing machine platforms.

Dobot is being actively developed, tested, and documented. We anticipate an extended beta testing process to fully test and release all software modules.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 499 or more
About US$ 499

[Makeblock Customized Version] You will receive a makeblock version robot arm with clipper, sucker, laser head, angle sensor, Bluetooth module, pen, pen clipper. You will also get 3D food printer kit more. Just for funs of Makeblock!